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“Oh, I see, sir.” Bollux said. “The stasis booths you and Max mentioned!”

“Give the ’droid a prize. When those booths start conking out, there’re gonna be some pretty cranky prisoners on the loose. The guy who might be able to pull our choobies out of the conflagration is one of them—Doc, Jessa’s father.”

They made their way down, past Hirken’s living quarters and the interrogation levels, encountering no one else in the stairwell. The gravity fluctuations lessened, but footing remained unpredictable. They arrived at another emergency door, and Han opened it manually.

Across a corridor was another door, which had been left open. Through it Han saw a long, wide aisle between high tiers of stasis booths like stacked, upright coffins. The lowest rows of booths were already darkened, empty, the highest still in operation. Booths in the middle two rows flickered.

But down in the aisles a line of six guards wavered before a mass of humans and nonhumans. The released prisoners, members of dozens of species, growled and roared their hostility. Fists, tentacles, claws, and paws shook angrily in the air. The Espos, waving their riot guns and advancing, tried to contain the break without firing, afraid they might be overwhelmed if they opened up.

A tall, demonish-looking being broke from the mob and launched himself at the Espos, his face splitting with mad laughter, hands grasping. A burst from a riot gun brought him down in a groaning heap. The prisoners’ hesitation disappeared; they advanced on the Espos in unison. What did they have to fear from death, compared with life in the interrogation chambers?

Han pushed Bollux aside, knelt behind the emergency-door frame, and cut loose at the guards. Two of them fell before they realized they were taking fire from their rear. One turned, then another, to exchange shots, while their fellows tried to hold back the seething prisoners.

Red darts of light crisscrossed. Smoke from charred metal rose from the doorframe with the ozone of blaster fire. The smell of burned flesh was in the air. The unnerved guards’ bolts zipped through the open emergency door or hit the wall, but failed to find their target. Han, kneeling to make himself as small a mark as possible, winced and flinched from the intense counterfire and cursed his own riot gun’s poor sighting characteristics.

He finally nailed one of the two Espos shooting at him. The other dropped to the floor to avoid being hit. Han, seeing that, used an old trick. Reaching through the door frame, he placed his weapon flat on its side on the floor, triggering frantically. The shots, aligned directly along the plane of the floor, found the prone Espo and silenced him in seconds.

The remaining guards broke. One let his piece fall and raised his hands, but it did him no good; the mob poured over and around him like an avalanche, burying him in murderous human and alien forms. The other Espo, trapped between Han’s sniping and the prisoners, started scaling one of the ladders connecting the catwalks along the tiers of stasis booths.

Partway up, the guard paused and shot those who had tried to follow him. Han’s shots, at the wrong angle, missed. Han gathered up Bollux, headed for the tier room.

The last Espo’s gunfire had made the prisoners draw back as he climbed for the third catwalk. From out of the pack of prisoners, three shaggy, simian creatures swarmed up after him, disdaining ladders, swinging up arm over long arm along the tiers’ outerworks. They overtook the Espo in moments.

He hung from the rungs long enough to shoot one of the simians. It fell with an eerie caw. The other ape-things drew even with the Espo, one on either side. As he tried to fire again, his weapon was snatched from his hand and dropped to those below. The yowling guard was then caught up by both his arms, swung, and hurled with incredible strength straight upward. He slammed against the ceiling above the highest row of booths and fell to the floor in a windmilling of arms and legs, with an ugly sound of impact.

Han, setting Bollux aside, ran to join the milling